Open, Reusable, and Configurable Multi Agent Systems: A Knowledge Modelling Approach

Mario Gómez Martínez Affiliation: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Institut d'Investigació en Intel-ligencia Artificial (Bellaterra, España) Biography: Not available Close window

Mario Gómez Martínez About the authors  Publication year: 2005 Language: English Subjects: Science and Technology Collection: Monografies de l'Institut d'Investigació en Intel-ligencia Artificial Free eBook

Abstract:

Although Multi Agent Systems are supposed to be open systems, most of the initial research has focused on closed systems, which are designed by one developer team for one homogeneous environment, and one single domain. This thesis aims to advance some steps towards the realization of the open Multi Agent Systems vision. Our work has been materialized into a framework for developing Multi Agent Systems that maximize the reuse of agent capabilities across multiple application domains, and support the automatic, on-demand configuration of agent teams according to stated problem requirements. On the one hand, this work explores the feasibility of the Problem Solving Methods approach to describe agent capabilities in a way that maximizes their reuse. However, since Problem Solving Methods are not designed for agents, we have had to adapt them to deal with agent specific concepts concerning the agent communication languages and interaction protocols. One the other hand, this thesis proposes a new model of the Cooperative Problem Solving process that introduces a Knowledge Configuration stage previous to the Team Formation stage. The Knowledge Configuration process performs a bottom-up design of a team in term of the tasks to be solved, the capabilities required, and the domain knowledge available. The statements made herein are endorsed by the implementation of an agent infrastructure that has been tested in practice. This infrastructure has been developed according to the electronic institutions formalism to specifying open agent societies. This infrastructure provides a social mediation layer for both requesters and providers of capabilities, without imposing neither an agent architecture, nor an attitudinal theory of cooperation. The contributions of our work are presented as a multilayered framework, going from the more abstract aspects, to the more concrete, implementation dependent aspects, concluding with the implementation of the agent infrastructure and a particular application example for cooperative information agents.

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